Facts post-modernity

'Facts are no longer the mouth-shutting alternative to politics, but what has to be stabilized instead.'

Bruno Latour, War of the Worlds: What about Peace? p.21

Down to just one part now...

And five minutes after posting the last structure, I think I need to do it chronologically. This is one of the reasons for keeping a blog: it enables me to see it differently....! Maybe....

Introduction

1. Knowledge and Civilisation 1939-1957

Knowledge, identified as important to the nation during the war, was doubly so after it, attached as it was to a now shaky idea of civilisation. This importance led to a funding structure that made knowledge purchasable, with government its potential buyer.

2. Knowledge and Progress 1945-1966

After the Second World War, civilisation and progress came to mean technological progress and economic growth, positioning universities as central to the economy

3. Knowledge and Revolution 1967-1973

Student revolution against the production of graduates as products, complicity of the university with ‘the establishment’ and experiments with pedagogy and governance established new norms, undermined old hierarchies and enabled the student-consumer.

4. Knowledge and Economics 1973-1989

In the 1980s, knowledge was so important to the economy that government felt it could not afford to leave it in the hands of academics and their gift economy

5. Knowledge and Nation 1980-1989

Government in the 1980s used funding structures to try to control knowledge and direct it to national priorities

6. Knowledge Trade 1986-1996

Universities attempted to control the knowledge trade through intellectual property, reconfiguring their business as a trade in knowledge, undermining their purpose

Conclusion

Epilogue

Thesis is now in TWO parts, not three

I am unbelievably excited that the High Court said no to UWA's request to appeal against Gray again, mostly because now it is definitely over in time to go into my thesis.

I have changed the structure: the last 3-part version was too long and contained things I had not really researched. I've now made it two-parts and 6 chapters and my only remaining worry is whether chapter 1 and chapter 4 are too repetitive. Below is the summary, hwre is the full version

The thesis: The competence to determine knowledge shifted from academic to the market – so academic freedom becomes market freedom.

The structure: is in two parts, focusing on the way knowledge since the second world war has been promoted as being ‘for the nation’ and ‘for the economy’ and the consequences, for knowledge, of each. The two parts are internally chronological.

Part A: Knowledge and the Nation
Shows the pathway from when the nation realised it had a strategic need for university knowledge to when it started to control it.

1. Knowledge and Civilisation: 1939-1966
Knowledge, identified as important to the nation during the war, was doubly so after it, attached as it was to a now shaky idea of civilisation. This importance led to a funding structure that made knowledge purchasable, with government its potential buyer.

2. Knowledge and Revolution 1967-1973
Student movements established that academic freedom can prevent canonical knowledge and allow innovation but they also undermined the authority of the university and accidentally created the conditions that would position the student as consumer.

3. Knowledge and National Priorities 1980-1989
Government in the 1980s used funding structures to try to control knowledge

Part B: Knowledge and The Economy
Shows that considering university knowledge to be for the economy commodified knowledge and undermined any valid purpose for the university

4. Knowledge and Progress 1945-1973
After the Second World War, civilisation and progress came to mean technological progress and economic growth, positioning universities as central to the economy

5. Knowledge-based Economy 1973-1989
In the 1980s, knowledge was so important to the economy that government felt it could not afford to leave it in the hands of academics and their gift economy

6. Economy of Knowledge 1986-1996
Universities attempted to control the knowledge trade through intellectual property, reconfiguring their business as a trade in knowledge, undermining their purpose

Conclusion

Epilogue: UWA v Gray
Universities are now often commercially motivated and so are many academics. The union has traditionally claimed to protect academic freedom, but in commercial terms it may not always be in the best interests of their members to do so. Government has encroached on university territory substantially: who will now protect academic freedom and ensure university quality?

Educating more than an elite

It has become quite clear that it universities’ job is no longer only to educate a small intellectual elite. Obviously, just as we accept in sport and music, we still need an intellectual elite. But while the educational mission of the university has changed, the teaching methods to match are taking a little longer to catch up.

Educating more rather than less is always a good thing: as well as improving the lives of participants in a thousand different ways, it helps to make society a more tolerant, civil, safe and prosperous place.

But a mission to educate an elite is rather different (though I have to say research on elite education is understandable not very prominent, so I am guessing from observations).

Firstly, you don’t even necessarily need to educate elite intellectuals, they are likely to do it themselves with enough competition and rewards. To locate your elite, you could just keep examining people and scraping them off the top until you get the few you are after. Teach them really, really badly and, with enough books in the library and tough enough exams, you’ll still end up with remarkably well educated people. In fact, the harder you make it to learn, the easier it will be to identify the elite who have learned it despite you.

Which is not to say the elite universities do that. Truthfully, they attract high performing students and higher performing staff so normally the teaching is pretty good, the exposure to research even better by students who were going to do great even if they weren’t. It is clear, I think, that the education system was at least partly set up with this skim-off-the-top approach working pretty successfully in identifying the required elite.

But the majority of universities are not elite and that is a good thing. And this is where the real education has to happen. This is because the students who enter have not been scraped off the top via the HSC exams, they are real, normal people needing a genuine education. Lots of them are going to go on to become the maths and history teachers of our school kids, nurses of our sick and auditors of our finances: so it is important.

The problem is, the people teaching them have normally been trained in an elite system. That is only a problem because, research pretty consistently suggests that ideas about what makes proper education are formed early and by one’s own learning experiences. So it seems to me likely that we have a lot of academics teaching non-elite students as if they were the elite. In the actual elite universities, this is fine. In the majority it could be a disaster, especially since expansion of the system is inevitable and imminent.

In talking to academics about designing learning activities to support normal people learning without reducing university standards a comment I have heard over and over is “we didn’t get all this scaffolding to support us when we were students, why shouldn’t my students have to struggle along like I did?” I think this is because they are the elite and their students are not (necessarily).

But there is a very real risk that, instead of developing teaching approaches that educate, rather than scrape people off the top, university standards will actually drop, which is why the system is currently obsessed with quality. But I would like to point out, once again:

You do not get quality by measuring it.

The reason standards could drop is that the starting level of students is dropping, as it must if the system will expand (which it will). There probably needs to be a systematic way of improving this starting level (maybe a bridging year) but for now I am interested in developing teaching methods. If courses are aligned to student needs rather than disciplinary standards, as some current pedagogies now suggest, then standards could drop. If assessment levels are gauged by average pass rates: that is, the difficult of assessment is adjusted by on average 90% of students passing, then as student starting levels drop, so will degree standards. You could fix this with standardized exams, but then we return to the problem this posting started off with.

Postgraduate qualifications in higher education/university teaching (which should not be the same thing but are, often) are thus becoming an indicator of (potential) quality in universities and, rightly, it is becoming an expectation that academic staff will obtain some teaching qualification like this. This is important if staff are to develop the new types of teaching skills required to genuinely educate new types of students.

One campus review article (http://www.campusreview.com.au/pages/section/article.php?s=Comment&idArticle=13897) recently suggests that, academic staff workloads are such that professional development disguised as postgraduate-level courses do not all have great standards themselves. It is entirely plausible that these standards could drop as academic workloads continue to increase and government incentives lead to strategic pressure to graduate larger quantities of academics from them.

This article suggests that academic development units, being attached to university strategy rather than academically independent in faculties, may themselves have incentives to keep these courses overly simple. There may not be any systematic imperative to assure disciplinary standards. And indeed, if they are all like this, then benchmarking them to each other will only affirm low standards. I am NOT saying that this is the case (I have not personally looked close enough to know), but as I said before “benchmarking is useless if everything is crap”.

If, rather, higher education was located in education faculties as research centres, with the pure pursuit of knowledge about higher education and university teaching as the primary goal and thus offering genuinely postgraduate level courses, we could be much more certain about the quality of these courses. Because academic freedom – the freedom to choose what to research and teach – is key to quality. And it requires separation from strategic and policy influence.

I am not an expert in all this, however, and I could well be wrong.

Universities protecting academic freedom?

I've said it before: Eric Ashby (1904-1992) was over optimistic about universities. Here's an example where I wish he wasn't:


"over a stretch of seven centuries they [universities] have learnt how to dissuade their patrons - princes, bishops, tycoons, alumni - from meddling in their affairs..."


In one case of interference that I heard about recently (I won't post details), when I lightly objected I was told that this is "the way things are, these days". Seven centuries. These days. 


I find it hard to believe the stakes are as high now as they sometimes have been over the past 700 years. Maybe it is just that universities don't think academic freedom matters anymore.

Find what wind served to advance an honest mind

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

John Donne, Song. Norton Anthology p.205

Final draft of structure

This is the structure I think, sorry about the crap formatting. The full version is at http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfqggshp_77drbdjgfv


Introduction


Part A: Knowledge and the Nation

Shows the pathway from when the nation realised it had a strategic need for university knowledge to when it started to control it.

1. Knowledge and War: 1939-1966

Second world war led to a sense of needing to purchase knowledge for the nation

2. Knowledge and Revolution 1967-1973

Students in the 1960s and 1970s thought that the connect between universities/knowledge and the nation strengthened the wrong sort of nation

3. Knowledge and National Priorities 1980-1989

Government in the 1980s used funding structures to try to control knowledge

Part B: Knowledge and The Economy

Shows that considering university knowledge to be for the economy commodified knowledge and undermined any valid purpose for the university

4. Knowledge and Progress 1945-1973

After the Second World War, civilisation and progress came to mean technological progress and economic growth, positioning universities as central to the economy

5. Knowledge Economy 1973-1989

In the 1980s, knowledge was so important to the economy that government felt it could not afford to leave it in the hands of academics and their gift economy

6. Economy of Knowledge 1986-1996

Universities attempted to control the knowledge trade through intellectual property, reconfiguring their business as a trade in knowledge, undermining their purpose

Part C: Knowledge “for its own sake”

Shows that knowledge “for its own sake” allows freedom to pursue knowledge wherever it leads, ensuring living, growing, quality knowledge for a civil, ethical, healthy and prosperous democracy.

7. Knowledge and Civilisation 1939-1966
Post-war concerns and cold war incidents regarding academic freedom show ways that academic freedom supports civility and democracy

8. Knowledge Utopias 1967-1973

Student knowledge utopias in the 1960s and 1970s show ways that academic freedom prevents the imposition of canonical or doctrinal knowledge, allowing new and innovative knowledge to emerge

9. Academic Labour and Academic Freedom 1973-1996

Tensions in the conditions and nature of academic labour in the 1980s and 1990s show that academic freedom gives academics the opportunity to pursue quality knowledge for a growing multiplicity of purposes

Conclusion

Epilogue: UWA v Gray

Universities are now often commercially motivated and so are many academics. The union has traditionally claimed to protect academic freedom, but in commercial terms it may not always be in the best interests of their members to do so. Government has encroached on university territory substantially: who will now protect academic freedom and ensure university quality?